Our Destinies Were Foreordained, 1441
Season Ten, Episode Eight Preceded by: Season Ten, Episode Seven: Gauve Was Right Followed by: Season Ten, Episode Nine: Time Zero Introducing: *Prince Avimeus Summary ::Sending to Ethan Dragonslayer: I regret. : The Mothers beckon the party into a room where they sit in five tanks. In the middle of the room is a Wall of Force trapdoor set into the floor. The Mothers bid the party to each stand next to a tank. : Ashra feels that the psionic energy in the room is an incredible amount of information being passed back and forth. She is not given a direct connection, but reaches out and looks for the information about which tank is which, wanting to stand by her own Mother. That information is not given to her. She asks what's in the cage, which is also not given to her; Leilah looks over and sees that several Inquisitors are chained within a subchamber 20 feet down. She keeps mum for now, since she wants Ashra to finish. : The Mothers reminds Ashra to go to a tank, and she does so, bringing Zaph with her. Each of the others chooses a tank and stands by it. : What we are about to tell you, you are not allowed to know. The world will end for the seventeenth time on the first day of the Injustinia, 1451. : The Mothers begin to light up, flashing between light and darkness at an ever-increasing speed. They claim that they are beginning a ritual. One or all of them say He's breaking through! : Ashra hears a voice in her head: Help me! : Who are you?" she thinks back. : ''Your mother. Ashra recognizes the voice. : ... what do you want me to do? : RUN! : Caught between five visible Mothers and her own Mother's voice, Ashra decides to follow Baldur's command. Ashra and Zaphodel dash towards the door back to the storage matrix. A deep voice bellows STOP! THIS IS NOT PART OF THE RITUAL! Ashra ignores them, hammering on the locked door as the rest of the party follows. Aether is slow to follow, not sure she trusts Ashra, and Leilah takes a moment to toss her spare holy symbol down towards the Inquisitors. She flubs her roll, shrugs, and bolts back towards the rest of the party. : Ashra screams at the Xeph, asking them if there's another way out; they reply, though terrified, that she is not meant to leave now. Ashra realizes they are under some domination. She also gets a flash of insight and realizes that her brothers are not really in the room. : She turns and looks down the hall in the mirror. There are not five flashing Mother Brains; instead there is a single one, teleporting between tanks at incredible speed, pretending to be five Mothers. She recognizes the feeling of the consciousness as High Regent Xenteroth. He is, she realizes, an ascendant alhoon; he has broken free from the illithid lifecycle and become an evil elder brain. The speech about a ritual was meant to trick her into making herself vulnerable so that he could eat her brain, perhaps to satisfy his evil cravings or give him some of her knowledge. Well fuck. Ashra asks her mother in her mind what she should do, but gets no further messages. : Xenteroth fires a Lightning Bolt down the hall, striking everyone. At the last minute he fails when the spell would have killed Zaphodel, and the party quickly fans out into the room to avoid presenting such attractive targets for spells. : Kruglor, who Xenteroth cannot see or detect, runs out and strikes him with his bone. Presumably, his Mind Blank negates Xenteroth's mindsight. : Leilah runs back to the trap door, then uses her domain power to dive inside the cage. She stumbles into a circular chamber holding five prisoners, four of which are Inquisitors. One of the Inquisitors, the one looking the healthiest, asks who she is, and she replies with her name and lineage. : The Inquisitor explains that he, like the other Inquisitors chained there, had been captured in the Eventide district. They had almost discovered where and how Grax and Xoth were building a Warforged army on Mechanus; they realized that instead of fleeing to the Southern Continent, the leaders of the Revolution had merely returned to Mechanus. : Leilah uses her foot to to nudge her spare holy symbol into his hands and shatters his chains with the Shatterspike. The Inquisitor looks at the holy symbol in puzzlement. "What, you don't have a feat that allows you to use that?". Either comforted by Leilah's words or just embarrassed, he replies, "Let's do this" and loops it over his head. Leilah now turns to the sole non-Inquisitor prisoner. This fabulous restrained gentleman is Prince Avimeus V. He introduces himself as Asmodeus, and after some brief discussion Leilah frees him as well. : Ashra, out of ideas for hurting or warding off Xenteroth, draws out the Dark Lantern. It protects her from evil, helping her resist him but also blocking her commands to Zaphodel. She realizes Xenteroth cannot dominate her as a normal elder brain would because he is undead and she is not. Cicero asks her what would interest Xenteroth, and she gives him a quick list of the party's knowledge about him. : Cicero starts concentrating on a combination of dwarf porn and a series of difficult puzzles of his own devising. Xenteroth stays still for a few moments, transfixed by the mystery. : Ashra holds up the Dark Lantern and focuses on infinity, trying to keep Xenteroth out of her own mind. : Eleven dumps 37 bottles of rum into one of the tanks, taking a shot from the last bottle to fuel himself before tossing it in. : Downstairs, Leilah looks up at the hatch 20 fet up. "I presume one of you has a spell for getting back up there." Asmodeus offhandedly mentions that he does, and the Inquisitor promptly collapses in joy. "...and you hold his hand." Asmodeus Dimension Doors up with Leilah and the Inquisitor. Before the Inquisitor can fuck up the party even more, Leilah starts squeezing with her gauntleted hand. "See that mind flayer over there? Behave." The Inquisitor runs for the door and starts trying to open it. : Xenteroth teleports near Ashra and attaches his tentacle to her head. She tries to tug free, fails, and uses her timewalker powers to Dimension Door free of him before he can extract her brain. : Kruglor chases Xenteroth as he teleports from tank to tank: invisible to Xenteroth, he strikes without fear of retaliation. Cicero and Aether dodge back and forth around him, dealing him massive damage and trying to avoid his tentacles. He throws around fireballs and lightning bolts, easily beating everyone's spell resistance. Avi turns himself into a gaseous form to avoid the tentacles. : Aether wants another flanker; Eleven charges into melee, confident in his lack of a physical brain, and notices only after the fact that he is very nearly deactivated. He strikes Xenteroth with his lightning zanbatou, and forces him to teleport. : Working together with a series of mighty blows, the melee attackers manage to bloody Xenteroth; as a response he sends out a wave of psychic energy which hurts almost everyone and deactivates Eleven. : Leilah asks Ashra what the Dark Lantern is doing; she explains, and the two devise a plan to hand it off so that Ashra can get free and command the badly wounded Zaphodel to run away from where she is an easy target for Xenteroth's spells. "Will I be more than ten feet from you at the end of your movement?" asks Ashra, whose sole concern is regaining contact with her beloved thrall. "Yes." replies Leilah, who is thinking of something else entirely. : Ashra runs up and hands the lantern to Leilah as she runs by. Leilah snatches the Lantern from Ashra and speeds back towards Xenteroth, and Zaph flees into the corridor by the Inquisitor. Now right next to Xenteroth, Leilah takes the Shatterspike and slams it into the Dark Lantern. "Needs more cowbell." : On Celestalia, a nearby plane of existence, angels hear a strange pop. Then the clouds begin to vanish into a dark, quickly expanding hole in the sky. The plane folds in onto Mechanus, then onto the next plane, and the next, and the next. : Eventually, nothing remains but a singularity, everything destroyed by the Lantern full of countless stars going supernova. : Leilah was doing great, but Kruglor isn't going to let her finish destroying the multiverse. Instead, Kruglor himself grabs the lantern from Ashra's outstretched hand, then he seizes Ashra around the waist and tosses her some twenty feet away, allowing Zaphodel to flee. : The Inquisitor reacts to Zaphodel's appearance, asking if she can open a lock. She shakes her head. Ashra speaks through her, explaining that the other side of the door is a room full of negative energy and asking the Inquisitor to help. She agrees, but has no spells or items, so the two hide in the hallway. : Cicero asks what can be done to the cerebral fluid in the tank. Ashra had wanted to add holy water to it, but no one has any. She tries to remember what Ethan told her, but can't recall anything. : Cicero decides to try something else insane. He drops to one knee and dramatically prays to Vecna, converting to the worship of the secret god with a sincere heart. He is rewarded with six casts of Prestidigitation and some odd looks from the party. : Ashra discovers that her wand of Disintegrate will effectively destroy a side of each tank, forcing Xenteroth to teleport to the next tank. The party falls into a rhythm: the melee fighters beat Xenteroth as hard as they can, he attaches tentacles to some of them, Leilah heals them until they'll survive the separation damage, and Ashra destroys a corner of the tank. Everyone is very low on health, but they're managing to hang in there. They've nearly killed him when disaster strikes. : Xenteroth, five-sixths of the way to the destruction of his corporeal body, casts Horrid Wilting. Their resources nearly gone, the party has no way to stop it. Zaphodel, the Inquisitor, Avimeus, and Aether die instantly. With his last moment of life, and several rerolls from Leilah, Avi saves the woman who saved him, throwing his force bubble around Leilah to shield her from the spell. She delevels from the effort and falls unconscious, bleeding. Cicero has only seconds to live. Ashra and Kruglor are the only ones standing. : Ashra watches her friends collapse, feels her thrall die forever, and glares in rage at the alhoon. Even if she and Kruglor can fell him, Leilah and Cicero will die before they can do so. : She takes out her wand of Time Stop, looks at it fondly, and activates its final charge. It buys her sixteen seconds. : First she runs to Cicero and heals him with her wand of Cure Light Wounds. Then she tugs him free of the tentacles attached to his head. He will be bleeding badly from the wounds when time resumes. She sticks the wand of Cure Light Wounds in his hand and drags him to the side of Leilah's force bubble. Then she disintegrates a corner of the tank, draining it of its fluid. She sticks a molotov cocktail in Kruglor's hand and lights it. When the cerebral fluid in the tank is drained, she pours all four pounds of the party's FFF powder into the bottom of the tank, then uses her final couple of seconds to run back away from where the explosion will be. : As time resumes, she shouts detailed directions as quickly as she can to each member of the party. Leilah, using more of her experience to buy luck rerolls, manages to stabilize. As directed, she pulls Cicero's dying body into her force bubble using her Travel domain power, then takes the wand Ashra put in his hand and snaps it. All the wand's charges detonate at once, healing both to full. : Kruglor sees that Leilah and Kruglor are safe, then saunters back and tosses the lit molotov into the tank. Xenteroth is nearly killed by the ensuing giant explosion. : The alhoon teleports, then strikes Ashra with a Cone of Cold. She timerages, but is unable to dodge the spell, and she falls dying to the ground. Kruglor throws his bone at Xenteroth, but it is ineffective, and he runs away from Ashra so that he will not be killed if Xenteroth decides to finish her off. : Leilah shoves Cicero out of the force bubble, then leaves it herself, running over to stand with Ashra in range for a mass cure spell. Cicero charges Xenteroth, jumps on him, and strikes a mighty blow with his sword, screaming "FOR VECNA!" : The lich falls. : With combat over, Leilah wanders over to Ashra and pokes her back to stable. The four survivors stand amongst the bodies of their dead friends, covered in their own blood, still amazed that they lived. : Ashra looks over at Zaphodel's body, then at the bodies of Avi and Aether. A pained expression passes over her face as she hears Xenteroth's voice: Your life cycle is a lie. I broke free of it, to make my own destiny. She knows what he is speaking about: the rumors that illithids' consciousness does not survive the merge with the Mother Brain, that the Elders steal the memories of their children and let them die forever when their twenty years of adulthood end. Perhaps it is a lich's cruel lie, but perhaps it is true... : She thinks over all she's learned and all she heard from the inquisitors. She is destined, she believes, to destroy and remake the world. Xenteroth, Grax, and Xoth have been working to stop the world from ending, not to cause its end. They were all working to hide the Frozen Fates. And even though she has worked to preserve the world, and takes great joy in its mysteries, the idea of going against the purpose her Mother gave her cannot even enter her thoughts. She calls out in her mind to her own Mother, but gets no response. : "I regret..." she says softly, leaning heavily on Leilah. Leilah hears none of this, more worried about their survival and wondering if they should just call the whole damn thing off. : There is a scratching sound. The Hand of Vecna drops out of the party loot and begins to scrabble across the floor. Leilah stomps on it. Category: Episodes Category: Season Ten Episodes